Now distribution are often centered on a DE, but before it was very common to have all the possible choices a available with any distribution. At that time, it

Now distribution are often centered on a DE, but before it was very common to have all the possible choices a available with any distribution. At that time, it was one of the fun thing to install multiple distributions (gnome, KDE, xfce, wm, blackbox, hundreds of small ones...) And switch between them just by logging out and selecting a new one for logging. Linux being magic with everything shared in the home folder, it was just the desktop changing but all the files staying the same.